Tonight in NY: An Essential Evening

The newest book I'm publicizing is out this week and the author is making just one appearance, this evening. Details pour vous:

Screenwriter and novelist Rudy Wurlitzer, who cut a legendary swathe across the Hollywood mainstream of the '70s and '80s with outsider classics like Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Alex Cox's Walker, and later, Bertolucci's Little Buddha, among others, will be doing ONE EVENT ONLY to celebrate the publication of his new novel, THE DROP EDGE OF YONDER (Two Dollar Radio, April 1). He'll be making an appearance with his friend, two-time National Book Award finalist  Scott Spencer, whose new novel, Willing, is described as "a tour de force that explores the limits of male restraint, the intoxications of privilege, the maddening dangers of freedom, and the knockdown, drag-out fight between our instincts and our better natures," at 192 Books tonight, Thursday, April 3, at 7PM (free, but reservations required; 192books.com).

The Drop Edge of Yonder is reviewed in the new issue of Bookforum by noted critic Erik Davis, who describes it is "a genre farce with oracular power—a Queen of Hearts sutra, a court jester's Blood Meridian." 

"Rudolph Wurlitzer's dreamy and brutal new Western might read as a meditation on death, but the novelist himself is in the midst of a rebirth. Two films for which he wrote the screenplays— Two-Lane Blacktop and Walker— were recently reissued as DVDs that feature nimble commentary from the author. And The Drop Edge of Yonder, Wurlitzer's first novel in 24 years, is his best to date." -- Michael Miller, Time Out New York

"...[A] psychedelic adventure . . . Ruminative and rip-roaring at once, it's earned early raves from critics." -- Entertainment Weekly

"an Epic Western that merges the unique narrative invention of his early novels with the cinematic drift of his best scripts." -- Dazed & Confused (not online, but see this month's print issue for a full-page interview)

More recent praise for THE DROP EDGE OF YONDER:

"A mystic western possessed of anarchic charms and incantatory beauty" -- Publisher's Weekly (starred review, 2/24)

"Wurlitzer opens up his cold-blooded prose veins with the blade of the western genre, and something sinister and mystically unsettling gushes out." -- Baltimore City Paper (2/6)

"One of the most purely, deeply thrilling, inspired, and inspiring American novels I've read in many years." -- Dennis Cooper

**ONLY AUTHOR APPEARANCE** April 3 at 192 Books in New York